Isabella Bird
Lake Tahoe
Letter
I
Lake Tahoe—Morning in San Francisco—Dust—A Pacific
mail-train—Digger Indians—Cape Horn—A mountain hotel—A pioneer—A Truckee livery
stable—A mountain stream—Finding a bear—Tahoe.
Lake
Tahoe, September 2
I
have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one’s life and sigh.
Not lovable, like the Sandwich Islands, but beautiful in its own way! A
strictly North American beauty—snow splotched mountains, huge pines, red-woods,
sugar pines, silver spruce; a crystalline atmosphere, waves of the richest
colour; and a pine-hung lake which mirrors all beauty on its surface. Lake
Tahoe is before me, a sheet of water twenty-two miles long by ten broad, and in
some places 1,700 feet
deep. It lies at a height of 6,000
feet and the snow-crowned summits which wall it in are
from 8,000 to 11,000
feet in altitude. The air is keen and elastic. There is
no sound but the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer’s axe.
It is
a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of San Francisco, which I
left in its cold morning fog early yesterday, driving to the Oakland ferry
through streets with side-walks heaped with thousands of cantaloupe and
water-melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pears, grapes, peaches,
apricots—all of startling size as compared with any I ever saw before. Other
streets were piled with sacks of flour, left out all night, owing to the
security from rain at this season. I pass hastily over the early part of the
journey, the crossing the bay in a fog as chill as November, the number of
“lunch baskets,” which gave the car the look of conveying a great picnic party,
the last view of the Pacific, on which I had looked for nearly a year, the
fierce sunshine and brilliant sky inland, the look of long rainlessness, which
one may not call drought, the valleys with sides crimson with the poison oak,
the dusty vineyards, with great purple clusters thick among the leaves, and
between the vines great dusty melons lying on the dusty earth. From off the
boundless harvest fields the grain was carried in June, and it is now stacked
in sacks along the track, awaiting freightage. California is a “land flowing
with milk and honey.” The barns are bursting with fullness. In the dusty
orchards the apple and pear branches are supported, that they may not break
down under the weight of fruit; melons, tomatoes, and squashes of gigantic size
lie almost unheeded on the ground; fat cattle, gorged almost to repletion,
shade themselves under the oaks; superb “red” horses shine, not with grooming,
but with condition; and thriving farms everywhere show on what a solid basis
the prosperity of the “Golden State” is founded. Very uninviting, however rich,
was the blazing Sacramento Valley, and very repulsive the city of Sacramento,
which, at a distance of 125
miles from the Pacific, has an elevation of only thirty
feet. The mercury stood at 103 degrees in the shade, and the fine white dust
was stifling.
In
the late afternoon we began the ascent of the Sierras, whose saw-like points
had been in sight for many miles. The dusty fertility was all left behind, the
country became rocky and gravelly, and deeply scored by streams bearing the
muddy wash of the mountain gold mines down to the muddier Sacramento. There
were long broken ridges and deep ravines, the ridges becoming longer, the
ravines deeper, the pines thicker and larger, as we ascended into a cool
atmosphere of exquisite purity, and before 6 P.M. the last traces of
cultivation and the last hardwood trees were left behind.
At
Colfax, a station at a height of 2,400 feet, I got out and walked the length of
the train. First came two great gaudy engines, the Grizzly Bear and the White
Fox, with their respective tenders loaded with logs of wood, the engines with
great, solitary, reflecting lamps in front above the cow guards, a quantity of
polished brass-work, comfortable glass houses, and well-stuffed seats for the
engine-drivers. The engines and tenders were succeeded by a baggage car, the
latter loaded with bullion and valuable parcels, and in charge of two “express
agents.” Each of these cars is forty-five feet long. Then came two cars loaded
with peaches and grapes; then two “silver palace” cars, each sixty feet long;
then a smoking car, at that time occupied mainly by Chinamen; and then five
ordinary passenger cars, with platforms like all the others, making altogether
a train about 700 feet
in length. The platforms of the four front cars were clustered over with Digger
Indians, with their squaws, children, and gear. They are perfect savages,
without any aptitude for even aboriginal civilization, and are altogether the
most degraded of the ill-fated tribes which are dying out before the white
races. They were all very diminutive, five feet one inch being, I should think,
about the average height, with flat noses, wide mouths, and black hair, cut
straight above the eyes and hanging lank and long at the back and sides. The
squaws wore their hair thickly plastered with pitch, and a broad band of the
same across their noses and cheeks. They carried their infants on their backs,
strapped to boards. The clothing of both sexes was a ragged, dirty combination
of coarse woolen cloth and hide, the moccasins being unornamented. They were
all hideous and filthy, and swarming with vermin. The men carried short bows
and arrows, one of them, who appeared to be the chief, having a lynx’s skin for
a quiver. A few had fishing tackle, but the bystanders said that they lived
almost entirely upon grasshoppers. They were a most impressive incongruity in
the midst of the tokens of an omnipotent civilization.
The
light of the sinking sun from that time glorified the Sierras, and as the dew
fell, aromatic odors made the still air sweet. On a single track, sometimes
carried on a narrow ledge excavated from the mountain side by men lowered from
the top in baskets, overhanging ravines from 2,000 to 3,000 feet deep, the
monster train snaked its way upwards, stopping sometimes in front of a few
frame houses, at others where nothing was to be seen but a log cabin with a few
Chinamen hanging about it, but where trails on the sides of the ravines pointed
to a gold country above and below. So sharp and frequent are the curves on some
parts of the ascent, that on looking out of the window one could seldom see
more than a part of the train at once. At Cape Horn, where the track curves
round the ledge of a precipice 2,500 feet in depth, it is correct to be
frightened, and a fashion of holding the breath and shutting the eyes prevails,
but my fears were reserved for the crossing of a trestle bridge over a very
deep chasm, which is itself approached by a sharp curve. This bridge appeared
to be overlapped by the cars so as to produce the effect of looking down
directly into a wild gulch, with a torrent raging along it at an immense depth
below. Shivering in the keen, frosty air near the summit pass of the Sierras,
we entered the “snow-sheds,” wooden galleries, which for about fifty miles shut
out all the splendid views of the region, as given in dioramas, not even
allowing a glimpse of “the Gem of the Sierras,” the lovely Donner Lake. One of
these sheds is twenty-seven miles long. In a few hours the mercury had fallen
from 103 degrees to 29 degrees, and we had ascended 6,987 feet in 105 miles! After passing
through the sheds, we had several grand views of a pine forest on fire before
reaching Truckee at 11 P.M. having traveled 258 miles. Truckee, the
center of the “lumbering region” of the Sierras, is usually spoken of as “a
rough mountain town,” and Mr. W. had told me that all the roughs of the
district congregated there, that there were nightly pistol affrays in
bar-rooms, etc., but as he admitted that a lady was sure of respect, and Mr. G.
strongly advised me to stay and see the lakes, I got out, much dazed, and very
stupid with sleep, envying the people in the sleeping car, who were already
unconscious on their luxurious couches. The cars drew up in a street—if street
that could be called which was only a wide, cleared space, intersected by
rails, with here and there a stump, and great piles of sawn logs bulking big in
the moonlight, and a number of irregular clap-board, steep-roofed houses, many
of them with open fronts, glaring with light and crowded with men. We had
pulled up at the door of a rough Western hotel, with a partially open front,
being a bar-room crowded with men drinking and smoking, and the space between
it and the cars was a moving mass of loafers and passengers. On the tracks,
engines, tolling heavy bells, were mightily moving, the glare from their
cyclopean eyes dulling the light of a forest which was burning fitfully on a
mountain side; and on open spaces great fires of pine logs were burning
cheerily, with groups of men round them. A band was playing noisily, and the
unholy sound of tom-toms was not far off. Mountains—the Sierras of many a
fireside dream—seemed to wall in the town, and great pines stood out, sharp and
clear cut, against a sky in which a moon and stars were shining frostily.
I
asked the Negro factotum about the hire of horses, and presently a man came in
from the bar who, he said, could supply my needs. This man, the very type of a
Western pioneer, bowed, threw himself into a rocking-chair, drew a spittoon
beside him, cut a fresh quid of tobacco, began to chew energetically, and put
his feet, cased in miry high boots, into which his trousers were tucked, on the
top of the stove. He said he had horses which would both “lope” and trot, that
some ladies preferred the Mexican saddle, that I could ride alone in perfect
safety; and after a route had been devised, I hired a horse for two days. This
man wore a pioneer’s badge as one of the earliest settlers of California, but
he had moved on as one place after another had become too civilized for him,
“but nothing,” he added, “was likely to change much in Truckee.” I was
afterwards told that the usual regular hours of sleep are not observed there.
The accommodation is too limited for the population of 2,000, which is
masculine mainly, and is liable to frequent temporary additions, and beds are
occupied continuously, though by different occupants, throughout the greater
part of the twenty-four hours. Consequently I found the bed and room allotted
to me quite tumbled looking. Men’s coats and sticks were hanging up, miry boots
were littered about, and a rifle was in one corner. There was no window to the
outer air, but I slept soundly, being only once awoke by an increase of the
same din in which I had fallen asleep, varied by three pistol shots fired in
rapid succession.
Once
on horseback my embarrassment disappeared, and I rode through Truckee, whose
irregular, steep-roofed houses and shanties, set down in a clearing and
surrounded closely by mountain and forest, looked like a temporary encampment;
passed under the Pacific Railroad; and then for twelve miles followed the
windings of the Truckee River, a clear, rushing, mountain stream, in which
immense pine logs had gone aground not to be floated off till the next freshet,
a loud-tongued, rollicking stream of ice-cold water, on whose banks no ferns or
trailers hang, and which leaves no greenness along its turbulent progress. All was
bright with that brilliancy of sky and atmosphere, that blaze of sunshine and
universal glitter, which I never saw till I came to California, combined with
an elasticity in the air which removed all lassitude, and gives one spirit
enough for anything. On either side of the Truckee great sierras rose like
walls, castellated, embattled, rifted, skirted and crowned with pines of
enormous size, the walls now and then breaking apart to show some snow-slashed
peak rising into a heaven of intense, unclouded, sunny blue. At this altitude
of 6,000 feet
one must learn to be content with varieties of coniferæ,
for, except for aspens, which spring up in some places where the pines have
been cleared away, and for cotton-woods, which at a lower level fringe the
streams, there is nothing but the bear cherry, the raspberry, the gooseberry,
the wild grape, and the wild currant. None of these grew near the Truckee, but
I feasted my eyes on pines which, though not so large as the Wellingtonia of
the Yosemite, are really gigantic, attaining a height of 250 feet, their huge
stems, the warm red of cedar wood, rising straight and branchless for a third
of their height, their diameter from seven to fifteen feet, their shape that of
a larch, but with the needles long and dark, and cones a foot long. Pines cleft
the sky; they were massed wherever level ground occurred; they stood over the
Truckee at right angles, or lay across it in prostrate grandeur. Their stumps
and carcasses were everywhere; and smooth “shoots” on the sierras marked where
they were shot down as “felled timber,” to be floated off by the river. To them
this wild region owes its scattered population, and the sharp ring of the
lumberer’s axe mingles with the cries of wild beasts and the roar of mountain
torrents.
The track
is a soft, natural, wagon road, very pleasant to ride on. The horse was much
too big for me, and had plans of his own; but now and then, where the ground
admitted to it, I tried his heavy “lope” with much amusement. I met nobody, and
passed nothing on the road but a freight wagon, drawn by twenty-two oxen,
guided by three fine-looking men, who had some difficulty in making room for me
to pass their awkward convoy. After I had ridden about ten miles the road went
up a steep hill in the forest, turned abruptly, and through the blue gloom of
the great pines which rose from the ravine in which the river was then hid,
came glimpses of two mountains, about 11,000 feet in height,
whose bald grey summits were crowned with pure snow. It was one of those
glorious surprises in scenery which make one feel as if one must bow down and
worship. The forest was thick, and had an undergrowth of dwarf spruce and
brambles, but as the horse had become fidgety and “scary” on the track, I
turned off in the idea of taking a short cut, and was sitting carelessly,
shortening my stirrup, when a great, dark, hairy beast rose, crashing and
snorting, out of the tangle just in front of me. I had only a glimpse of him,
and thought that my imagination had magnified a wild boar, but it was a bear.
The horse snorted and plunged violently, as if he would go down to the river,
and then turned, still plunging, up a steep bank, when, finding that I must
come off, I threw myself off on the right side, where the ground rose
considerably, so that I had not far to fall. I got up covered with dust, but
neither shaken nor bruised. It was truly grotesque and humiliating. The bear
ran in one direction, and the horse in another. I hurried after the latter, and
twice he stopped till I was close to him, then turned round and cantered away.
After walking about a mile in deep dust, I picked up first the saddle-blanket
and next my bag, and soon came upon the horse, standing facing me, and shaking
all over. I thought I should catch him then, but when I went up to him he
turned round, threw up his heels several times, rushed off the track, galloped
in circles, bucking, kicking, and plunging for some time, and then throwing up
his heels as an act of final defiance, went off at full speed in the direction
of Truckee, with the saddle over his shoulders and the great wooden stirrups
thumping his sides, while I trudged ignominiously along in the dust,
laboriously carrying the bag and saddle-blanket.
The
beauty is entrancing. The sinking sun is out of sight behind the western
Sierras, and all the pine-hung promontories on this side of the water are rich
indigo, just reddened with lake, deepening here and there into Tyrian purple.
The peaks above, which still catch the sun, are bright rose-red, and all the
mountains on the other side are pink; and pink, too, are the far-off summits on
which the snow-drifts rest. Indigo, red, and orange tints stain the still
water, which lies solemn and dark against the shore, under the shadow of
stately pines. An hour later, and a moon nearly full—not a pale, flat disc, but
a radiant sphere—has wheeled up into the flushed sky. The sunset has passed
through every stage of beauty, through every glory of color, through riot and
triumph, through pathos and tenderness, into a long, dreamy, painless rest,
succeeded by the profound solemnity of the moonlight, and a stillness broken
only by the night cries of beasts in the aromatic forests.
I.L.B.
Isabella Lucy Bird (October 15, 1831 – October 7, 1904) was
a nineteenth-century English traveller, writer, and a natural historian.
Early
life
Bird was born in Boroughbridge
in 1831 and grew up in Tattenhall, Cheshire.[1] As her father Edward was a Church
of England priest, the family moved several times across Britain as he received
different parish postings, most notably in 1848 when he was replaced as vicar of St. Thomas'
when his parishioners objected to the style of his ministry.
Bird was a sickly child and spent
her entire life struggling with various ailments. Much of her illness may have
been psychogenic,
for when she was doing exactly what she wanted she was almost never ill. Her
real desire was to travel. In 1854, Bird's father gave her £100 and she went to
visit relatives in America. She was allowed to stay until her money ran
out. She detailed the journey anonymously in her first book The Englishwoman
in America, published in 1856. The following year, she went to Canada and then
toured Scotland.
Time spent in Britain always seemed to make her
ill and, following her mother's death in 1868, she embarked on a series of
excursions to avoid settling permanently with her sister Henrietta (Henny) on
the Isle
of Mull. Bird could not endure her sister's domestic lifestyle, preferring
instead to support further travels through writing. Many of her works are
compiled from letters she wrote home to her sister in Scotland.
Travels
Bird finally left Britain in 1872, going first to Australia,
which she disliked, and then to Hawaii (known in Europe as the Sandwich
Islands), her love for which prompted her second book (published
three years later). While there she climbed Mauna Loa
and visited Queen Emma.[1] She then moved on to Colorado, then
the newest member of the United
States, where she had heard the air was
excellent for the infirm. Dressed practically and riding not sidesaddle but
frontwards like a man (though she threatened to sue the Times for saying
she dressed like one), she covered over 800 miles in the Rocky
Mountains in 1873. Her letters to her sister, first printed in the magazine
Leisure Hour,[1] comprised her fourth and perhaps
most famous book, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains.
Bird's time in the Rockies was enlivened especially by her acquaintance with
Jim Nugent,
a textbook outlaw with one eye and an affinity for violence and poetry. "A
man any woman might love but no sane woman would marry," Bird declared in
a section excised from her letters before their publication. Nugent also seemed
captivated by the independent-minded Bird, but she ultimately left the Rockies and her "dear desperado." Nugent was
shot dead less than a year later.
At home, Bird again found herself
pursued, this time by John Bishop, an Edinburgh
doctor in his thirties. Predictably ill, she went traveling again, this time to
Asian: Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore and
Malaysia.
Yet when her sister died of typhoid in 1880, Isabella was heartbroken and finally
accepted Bishop's marriage proposal. Her health took a severe turn for the
worse but recovered by Bishop's own death in 1886. Feeling that her earlier
travels had been hopelessly dilettante, Bird studied medicine and resolved to
travel as a missionary.
Despite her nearly sixty years of age, she set off for India.
Later years
Arriving on the subcontinent in
February 1889, Bird visited missions in India, crossed Tibet, and then
travelled in Persia,
Kurdistan
and Turkey. The
following year she joined a group of British soldiers travelling between Baghdad and Tehran. She
remained with the unit's commanding officer during his survey work in the
region, armed with her revolver and a medicine chest supplied - in possibly an
early example of corporate sponsorship - by Henry
Wellcome's company in London.
Featured in journals and
magazines for decades, Bird was by now something of a household name. In 1892,
she became the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society. Her final
great journey took place in 1897 where she travelled up the Yangtze and Han rivers which are in China and Korea, respectively.
Later still, she went to Morocco, where she travelled among the Berbers
and had to use a ladder to mount her black stallion, a gift from the Sultan.[1] She died in Edinburgh
within a few months of her return in 1904, just shy of her seventy-third
birthday. She was still planning another trip to China.
"There never was
anybody," wrote the Spectator, "who had adventures as well as Miss
Bird." In 1982, Caryl Churchill used her as a character in her play
Top Girls.
Much of the dialogue written by Churchill comes from Bird's own writings.
In 2006, Bird was featured in Bedrock:
Writers on the Wonders of Geology edited by Lauret E. Savoy, Eldridge M. Moores, and Judith E. Moores (Trinity University Press) which looks at
writing over the years and how it pays tribute to the Earth and its geological
features.
